Sight of Proteus (12 page)

Park Green was back in Wolf's office, shoes off, long legs stretched out. The general confusion of the place had worsened. Computer listings, empty food trays, and maps were scattered on every flat surface. Wolf and Larsen were again standing by the wall display, plotting the Mattin Link access from both the Mariana Trench entry point and the spaceport entry point in Australia. Wolf read off the results before he replied to Green's question.

"North Australia direct to the Marianas—so they could have gone there direct from the spaceport, except that we know they didn't. The Mariana entry point connects direct to North China, Hawaii, and back of course to North Australia. None of those are promising. There's no big form-change lab anywhere near any of them. What do you think, John?"

Larsen scratched his head thoughtfully. "Two possibilities. Either your hunch about the use of the Link system is all wrong, or the people who moved the Mariana Monsters to Guam did more than one jump in the system. Where do we get with two jumps?"

Wolf read out the connections, and shook his head.

"That takes us a lot further afield. With two jumps you can get almost anywhere from a Marianas starting point. Up to the North Pole, down to Cap City at the South Pole, into India, up to North America—it's a mess."

Wolf put down the display control and came over to where Park Green was sitting.

"I'm more convinced than ever that we need Robert Capman's help," he said. "We still don't know what was happening when they died. They started on some form-change program and somewhere along the line it went wrong. I wish I could ask Capman how."

"You never answered my question, you know," said Green. "What do we do next? Where do we go from here? Advertising for Capman won't solve your problem—he'll be regarded as a mass murderer if he ever does show up on Earth."

"I think I can produce a message that he will recognize and be intrigued by, but other people won't understand," answered Wolf. "As for protecting him if he does show up, I'm not worried about that. I feel sure that he'll have found ways to cover himself in the past four years. I've got another worry of my own. I have no way of knowing how urgent this thing is. It could be a once-in-a-lifetime accident that will never happen again, or it could be the beginning of some kind of general plague. We think it isn't contagious, but we have no proof of it. Until we know what we're dealing with, I have to assume the worst. Let me take a crack at that message."

The final announcement was short and simple. It went out on a general broadcast over all media to the fourteen billion on Earth, and by boosted transmission to the scattered citizens of the United Space Federation. The signal would be picked up all the way out past Neptune, and a repeater station would even make it accessible to parts of the outer system Halo.

"To R.S.C. I badly need the talents that caused me to pursue you four years ago through the byways of Old City. I promise you a problem worthy of your powers. Behrooz Wolf."

* * *

Troubles were mounting. Bey spent many hours with a representative of BEC, who insisted on presenting more confidential records to prove that the company had no connection with the monster forms. The Central Coordinators' office sent him a terse message, asking if there would be other deaths of the same type, and if so, when, where and how many? Park Green was getting the same sort of pressure from the USF. Unlike Bey Wolf, he had little experience of that kind of needling. He spent a good part of his time sitting in Bey's office, gloomily biting his nails and trying to construct positively worded replies with no information content.

Two days of vagueness brought a stronger response from Tycho City. Bey arrived in his office early and found a small, neatly dressed man standing by the communicator. His clothes were USF style, and he was calling out personnel records for the three crew members of the Jason. He turned around quickly as Bey entered, but there was no sign of embarrassment at being discovered using Bey's office without invitation.

He looked at Bey closely before he spoke.

"Mr. Green?" The voice was like the person, small and precise, and offered more of a statement than a question.

"No, he'll be in later. I'm Behrooz Wolf, and I'm head of the Office of Form Control. What can I do for you?" Bey was suddenly conscious of his own casual appearance and uncombed hair.

The little man drew himself up to his full height.

"I am Karl Ling, special assistant to the USF Cabinet." The tone of voice was peppery and irascible. "I have been sent here to get some real answers about the deaths of three of our citizens here on Earth. I must say at the outset that we regard the explanations offered so far by your office and by Mr. Green as profoundly unsatisfactory."

"Arrogant bastard," thought Bey. He looked at his visitor closely while he sought a suitably conciliatory answer, and felt a sudden sense of recognition.

"We have been doing our best to provide you with all the facts, Mr. Ling," he said at last. "We all thought it was unwise to present theories until we have some definite way of verifying them. I'm sure you realize that this case is a complex one, and has a number of factors that we haven't encountered before."

"Apparently it does." Ling had taken a seat by the communicator and was tapping his thigh irritably with a well-manicured left hand. "For example, I see that the cause of death is stated as asphyxiation. But the post mortem shows that the dead men had only normal air in their lungs, with no poisonous constituents. Perhaps you would be willing to present your theory on that to me—there is no need to wait for a full verification."

Ling's tone was sceptical, and definitely insulting. Bey felt a sudden doubt about his own intuitive reaction to Ling's presence. In the past, dealing with officious government representatives, Bey had found an effective method of removing their fangs. He thought of it as his saturation technique. The trick was to flood the nuisance with so many facts, figures, reports, graphs, tables and analyses that he was inundated and never seen again. The average bureaucrat was unwilling to admit he had not read what he was given. Bey went over to his desk and took out a black record tablet.

"This is a private interlock for the terminal in this office. It has in it the data entry codes that will allow you to pull all the records on this case. They are rather voluminous, so analysis will take time. I suggest that you use my office here and feel free to use my communicator as the output display device for Central Files. Nothing will be hidden from you. This machine has a full access code."

Bey felt rather self-conscious about his own pompous manner, but it was the right action, whether or not his first intuitive response to Ling had been correct.

The little man stood up, his eyes gleaming. They were a curious brownish-yellow in color, with flecks of gold. He rubbed his hands together.

"Excellent. Please arrange it so that I am not disturbed. However, I do wish to see Mr. Green immediately when he arrives."

Far from being subdued, Karl Ling was clearly delighted at the prospect of a flood of information. Bey left him to it, and went to give the news to Park Green.

"Karl Ling?" Green looked impressed. "Sure I know him—or know of him. I've never met him myself, but I know his reputation. He's supposed to be one of the Inner Circle at top levels of the USF. He's also something of an expert on Loge and the Belt. He did a whole series of holovision programs a few years ago, and he used part of one of them in tracing the history of the discovery of Loge. It was a popular program, and he did a good job. He began way back, hundreds of years ago. . ."

* * *

(Cameras move from the illuminated model and back to Ling, standing)

"School-capsules give the 1970's as the first date in Loge's history. Actually, we can find traces of him much further back than that. The best starting-point is probably 1766. A few years before the French and American Revolutions, a German astronomer came up with a formula that seemed to give the relative distances of the planets from the Sun. His name was Johann Titius. His work didn't become famous until it was picked up a few years later by another German, Johann Bode, and the relation he discovered is usually called the Titius-Bode Law, or just Bode's Law."

(Cut to a framed lithograph of Bode, then to the table of planetary distances. Zoom in on blank spot in the table showing question mark)

"Bode pointed out that there was a curious gap in the distance formula. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn fitted it—and that is all the planets they knew of at the time—but there seemed to be one missing. There ought to be a planet between Mars and Jupiter, to make the formula really fit the Solar System. Then William Herschel, in 1781, discovered another planet, further from the Sun than Saturn."

(Cut to high resolution color image of Uranus, rings in close-up, image of Herschel as insert on the upper left. Cut back to Ling)

"It fitted Bode's Law all right, but it wasn't in the right place to fill the spot between Mars and Jupiter. The search for a missing planet began, and finally in 1800 the asteroid Ceres was discovered at the correct distance from the Sun. Soon after, other asteroids were found at about the same distance as Ceres. The first pieces of Loge had appeared."

(Cut to image of Ceres, zoom in for high resolution shot of Ceres City and greenhouse system. Cut to diagram showing planetary distances, with multiple entry between Mars and Jupiter, then back to Ling)

"There now seemed to be too many planets. As more and more asteroids were found, the theory grew that they were all fragments of a single planet. It was a speculation without hard evidence for a long time, until in 1972 the Canadian astronomer Ovenden provided the first solid proof. Using the rates of change in the orbits of the planets as his starting point, he was able to show they were all consistent with the disappearance from the Solar System of a body of planetary mass, roughly sixteen million years ago. He was also able to estimate the mass as about ninety times the mass of the Earth. Loge was beginning to take on a definite shape."

(Cut to image of Ovenden, then to artist's impression of the size and appearance of Loge, next to an image of Earth at the same scale)

"The next part of the story came just a few years later, in 1975. Van Flandern in the United States of America integrated the orbits of long-period comets backwards through time. He found that many of them had periods of about sixteen million years—and they had left from a particular region of the Solar System, between Mars and Jupiter. Parts of Loge were paying their first return visit, after a long absence."

(Cut to animated view of cometary orbits, showing their intersection with a diagram of the System. Run animation backwards, to show all orbits coming together at a single point between Mars and Jupiter)

"This led to the first modern ideas of Loge: a large planet, a gas-giant of ninety Earth masses, almost the same size as Saturn. It disintegrated about sixteen million years ago in a cataclysm beyond our imagining. The explosion blew most of Loge out of the System forever. A few parts of the planetary core remain as the asteroids. Other fragments, from the outer crust of Loge, drop back into the Solar System from time to time as long-period comets."

(Move in to close-up of Ling, head and shoulders)

"That looked like the full story, until we were able to go out and take a close look at the long-period cometary fragments. We found that some of them are packed with transuranic elements. The mystery of Loge had returned, bigger than ever. Why should parts of Loge's outer crust, alone of all the Solar System, contain transuranic elements? Their half-lives are less than twenty million years, in a System that is many billions of years old. They should have decayed long ago. Were they formed somehow in the explosion of Loge? If so, why are they found only in the outer crust, not in the asteroids that came from Loge's core? How were they formed? To all these questions, we still have no satisfactory answers."

(Cut to image of Loge again, feed in beginning of fade-out music, at low volume)

"One final and tantalizing fact. Sixteen million years is nothing, it is like yesterday on the cosmic scale. When Loge disintegrated there were already primates on the Earth. Did our early ancestors look into the sky one night, and behold the fearful sight of Loge's explosion? Is it conceivable that another planet might suffer a similar fate?"

(Fade-out as image of Loge begins to swell, changes color, breaks asunder. Final music crescendoes for the ending)

* * *

"It still puzzles me why Ling should be appointed to this investigation. He writes his own ticket, of course. Maybe he knew one of the dead Grabbers—he seemed to know everything there was to know about the Belt and the Belters." Green shook his head unhappily. "I suppose I'll have to get in and meet the man, and find out what he wants me to do now that he's here. I hope he's not going to try and demote me to being a messenger boy."

Together, Green and Wolf walked back to Bey's office. Karl Ling did not look up as they entered. He was oblivious to his surroundings, deeply engrossed in his review of the autopsy records on the three dead crew members of the Jason. Wolf's saturation techniques apparently didn't work on Ling. He became aware of them only when Wolf stepped in front of him and spoke.

"As soon as you want it, Mr. Ling, we are ready to give you a briefing on our findings. This is Park Green, who is representing the USF here at Form Control."

Ling looked up briefly, then returned his attention to the medical records. His glance had taken in the two other men for only a fraction of a second, but Bey had the feeling they had both been scanned and tucked away in memory.

"Very good," said Ling, eyes still fixed on the output screen. "For a start, why don't you answer the most basic question for me. The three dead men had clearly been involved in a form-change process. Where are the bio-feedback machines located that were used on them?"

Wolf grimaced at Park Green. "We don't have that answer for you yet, sir," he replied. "Though of course we recognize its importance, and we are working on it."